Album review: &#8216;Picture in Black and White&#8217;

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

…Like many families of mixed ancestry and interracial families in the Northeast, the Joneses seemed to live in an ambiguous space in the American system of racial classification. They seemed to be neither denying nor actively claiming a black racial identity. Sociologists of the time and current historians have documented a number of cases—indeed a pattern—of mixed-race or mixed-marriage families living quietly in small “white” towns. Unlike the model of “passing,” in with formerly black-identified individuals or families would become white-identified, many of these individuals and families simply lived in the spaces between absolutes. Less consciously a political act of affirmation or denial of self, racial ambiguity enabled such individuals and families to embrace the multiple histories that constituted them. They were black and white and other. They understood that American society lacked a suitably dexterous category for those who defied the conventions of perception and boundary. Former Kentucky politician Mae Street Kidd, born to a black mother and white father in 1904, summarized the sentiment of many when she wrote, “I never made an issue of my race. I let people think or believe what they wanted to. If it was ever a problem, then it was their problem, not mine.”…

Lewis, Earl and Heidi Adrizzone. Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White. New York: W. W. Norton. 2002. Pages 36-37.

Album review: ‘Picture in Black and White’

Album review: ‘Picture in Black and White’

Rochester CITY Newspaper
Rochester, New York
2018-09-24

Ron Netsky

Concept albums are common in rock, but rare in the jazz realm. Tessa Souter’s “Picture in Black and White“—set for release on October 5—breaks that mold. Souter, a Rochester favorite after multiple jazz festival appearances, has created an exquisite musical exploration of her identity. At the age 28, she discovered that her birth father was black and her roots reached from Africa to the Caribbean, from Celtic Britain to Andalusian Spain. Musical strains from all of these places permeate the album….

Read the entire review here.

Tags: music, Rochester CITY Newspaper, Ron Netsky, Tessa Souter

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2018 at 03:16Z and is filed under Autobiography, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Mixed Race Studies

Album review: ‘Picture in Black and White’

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta